When the deer springs onto the road, Wanda slams on the brakes stopping a couple of feet from it. The deer stands looking deeply into her eyes. Wanda thinks that this is the first moment of intimacy she’s had for a long time, this shared moment of near death, both deer and woman feeling the same emotion, a more intimate connection than with either man she married, both of them having whatever joy they owned burned out of them by World War II, so Wanda’s been alone for nearly fifty years, except this morning she’s feeling something with another of God’s beings, and though it’s fear, she’s so grateful for it that she weeps.
FICTION October 1, 2025
The Deer Springs
John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.